Editorial: A bid to break housing barriers — along with Marin’s fight to keep them — lives on

State Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, left, confers with State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, center, during a hearing on their housing bills Wednesday, April 24, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. McGuire merged his bill, SB4 with Wiener bill, SB50 that would increase housing near transportation and job hubs. The bill was approved by the Senate Governance and Finance Committee. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Years into a ruinous housing and homelessness crisis, California’s paleolithic housing politics have at long last begun to shift. But Marin County’s refusal to join the lurch toward reality, like much of the county itself, might as well be encased in amber.

A key committee this week approved legislation by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to legalize apartment buildings near mass transit and job centers in cities and suburbs that effectively outlaw them. The bipartisan vote was a high-water mark for the most ambitious legislative response to the housing shortage.

But the price of passage through the Governance and Finance Committee, led by Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, was a carve-out for Marin and other counties he represents — not the first time the area got special dispensation from the threat of affordable housing.

The latest iteration of Wiener’s SB50 exempts from its core provisions counties with fewer than 600,000 residents, including Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Santa Cruz and Monterey. The rest of the Bay Area — San Francisco and San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa counties — and most of Southern California would have to allow four- or five-story residential development regardless of local zoning near rail, ferry and high-frequency bus lines. They would also have to abandon density restrictions and lower parking requirements in other areas with abundant jobs but scarce housing.

The compromise tempers some restrictive zoning in smaller counties such as the North Bay’s, allowing another story and less parking near mass transit. It would also broadly legalize multifamily housing up to four units, ending exclusionary single-family zoning.

Since a version of the bill was dispatched at its first hearing last year, as SB827, other amendments have reduced the allowed building heights, increased affordable-housing requirements, added protections for rental housing and gentrification-prone neighborhoods, and extended its scope to high-employment, housing-scarce areas that aren’t near transit.

In another encouraging development for housing this week, Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, withdrew a bill to allow more local rent control, which tends to diminish the supply of apartments. Legislators advanced a more moderate measure, by Democratic Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco, to curb extraordinary rent increases statewide, suggesting potential for a package of housing legislation that protects renters and encourages desperately needed urban and suburban construction.

It’s an unfortunate irony that Wiener’s newly amended legislation would enshrine some of the parochial obstructionism it was designed to prevent. That could embolden the powerful anti-housing lobbies in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities and suburbs that would prefer to kill the bill entirely. If the legislation survives and reins in those forces, the compromise will have been worth making.

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